Editorial March 2015

The March issue of e-Polymers presents eight highly interesting contributions. Several of these contributions deal with novel synthetic approaches and materials using heterogeneous systems. The importance of interphase approaches in polymer chemistry for design of novel synthetic pathways as well as novel materials cannot be emphasized enough and should be intensively taught to beginners in polymer science. At the interphases novel phenomenon occur and thereby offer plenty of opportunities for novel and challenging research.

In this context, the paper by Hou et al. reports on the synthetic approach to polyacrylamide particles by dispersion polymerization via atom transfer radical polymerization. The authors show very good control over molecular weight, polydispersity, and chain ends which surely offers many new opportunities for this kind of heterogeneous living polymerization for complex polymer architectures. An approach to blend microparticles of silk fibroin/chitosan by emulsification and solvent diffusion is presented by Cheerarot and Baimark. Interestingly, the authors did not use any surfactants which could be of importance for biomedical applications. They found in contrast to previous studies by systematic variation of blend composition different particle shapes, surface topologies, and dissolution characteristics of these useful microparticles. As reported by Li et al., composites of polyaniline nanorods and porous carbon nitride sheets with good dispersion and thereby improved property profile are obtained by interfacial polymerization, which once more shows the meaning of interfacial methods.

A very unusual but highly interesting heterogeneous material is reported by Aydinoğlu based on composite hydrogels of poly(acrylamide-co-acrylic acid) and spirulina, which are microalgae originating from bacteria. Higher swelling and better pH sensitivity of these composite hydrogels are reported, which is attributed to the interaction of the macromolecules with the functional groups on spirulina. Artificial neural networks are used by Pourhakkak for modeling electrospinning of chitosan/poly(vinyl alcohol) nanofibers and compared to experimental results with very close agreement in modeling and experiment. With this the authors are able to predict the nanofiber diameters but also evaluate the impact of different experimental parameters.

The editors would like to take the opportunity to encourage the readers and contributors of e-Polymers to suggest reviews on hot topics in polymer science, either as mini reviews, comprehensive reviews or progress reports. This would be an excellent platform to share your views with the polymer community for the benefit of our joint research field.